1. Field
The present disclosure relates to power amplifiers. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to scalable periphery tunable matching power amplifiers.
2. Description of Related Art
In the field of mobile radios, a typical power amplifier vendor is dependent on the ability to quickly change either a power amplifier (PA) or a power amplifier module (PAM). Power amplifiers and power amplifier modules are typically needed to meet custom specifications from mobile radio manufacturers to meet their customer's system specifications. This can be a difficult task for those PAs and PAMs implemented in silicon (Si) technologies due in part to long design cycle times and also long fabrication cycle times. These Si technologies include, but are not limited to, complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, silicon on insulator (SOI) CMOS technology, silicon on sapphire (SOS) CMOS technology, and bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) technology (e.g. technology involving a combination of bipolar junction transistors and CMOS transistors).
A power amplifier is an important component in many radio frequency (RF) systems, as the power amplifier is usually necessary to amplify an RF signal prior to transmitting the RF signal using an antenna. During cellular voice communications, a power amplifier typically spends a small fraction of operation time operating at peak power level. However, during wireless data communications, the power amplifier can spend a significant portion of operation time operating at peak power level to allow more efficient data transmission.
Various cellular communications devices operate on different frequency bands in the RF spectrum. For example, there are frequency bands in use at 700-900 MHz and 1700-2400 MHz as well as many others. Current cellular devices are not capable of covering multiple bands simultaneously because of expense incurred when adding extra components that would enable such cellular devices to cover multiple bands simultaneously. However, an amplifier that can be tuned can be utilized to enable a power amplifier in an RF front-end that covers many bands. For this reason, tunability of power amplifiers shows promise for future power amplifier design.